For New Yorkers, watching a play that is predominantly a story about a Texan company in meltdown was always going to be very uncomfortable. In the play, we use footage of George Bush being inaugurated; on Broadway, some people would start heckling and hissing, while another pocket of the audience would applaud.

But however democratic New York is as a town, people there are still wealthy – and Enron isn't about politics, it's about finance and the mindset of wealth and acquisition. In the UK, money is dirty and sexy; people from the corporate finance world came to see it and were tickled. But in the US, money has nobility.

Enron makes an attack on different kinds of faith, not just our faith in finance – which was troubling, I think, for Americans. It finishes with a quote from the Bible that is then twisted into a reference to finance: there, we were attacking twin American totems.

Americans also like having a hero character to root for – an Erin Brockovich or a Robert Redford; Enron doesn't give them that. And from the classic, quite naturalistic opening scenes, the play quickly becomes strange and expressionistic. In the UK, that is exactly where I feel audience reactions really take off; in America, almost the exact opposite happened. People were enjoying it as a serious piece of work, and then they read the play's expressionist side as somehow whimsical or superficial.

The really sad thing about the play's closure is that, in directing it, I was really influenced by American showbiz and the Broadway musical, while Lucy [Prebble, the writer] was drawing on all the current great American TV drama. The Broadway cast felt that the text was really American, too – it didn't feel as if we were bringing an English play over to the Americans.

And it's sad that there was no consensus among audiences – some people, like the New York Times critic Ben Brantley, clearly found it problematic, but a lot of people raved about it.

Maybe it was a generational thing – in London, we were lucky to play to younger audiences. It's a loud, fun, rock'n'roll show, so perhaps some people found that a little aggressive. It's just a shame that now more New Yorkers won't get a chance to decide for themselves.